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Hello! Welcome to The Apples in My Orchard, a reflective blog that will explore the ups and downs, as well as the ins and outs of “student-hood”, in addition to other topics that pique my interest enough to share through writing. You will find, as I hope you stop by to read my posts, that I am not really going to write about fruit, although my title would lead you to believe so. Despite having a home fruit orchard filled with a variety of apple, plum, cherry, and pear trees, the term “apples” refer to my students. These students are my own children – three boys, rapidly becoming young men, as well as six year’s worth of writer’s circle students and twelve year’s of garden club students. This amounts to no small number of students, roughly 600 over the last twelve years! My apples also include other students that I have advocated for because they have special needs – needs of the talented and gifted – that are unfortunately poorly understood and even more poorly addressed. And, if I really wanted to fill the basket, my apples would encompass the children in classes where I have been a substitute teacher, the children that attended Craft Time with Carol at our local children’s museum years ago, and the premature babies I cared for as a NICU nurse in what seems like a very distant past.

Bushels and bushels of apples!

At the core of my posts will be the cultivation of the apples – yours, mine, and theirs.